• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.99-108
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• 2013

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. In particular, effects of prosodic context on duration and intensity of syllables and words have been widely reported. Drawing on prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study attempted to examine whether and how prosodic prominence and phrase boundary of everyday conversational speech, as determined by a large group of ordinary listeners, are related to the phonetic realization of duration and intensity. The results showed that the patterns of word durations and intensities are influenced by prosodic structure. Closer examinations revealed, however, that the effects of prosodic prominence are not the same as those of prosodic phrase boundary. With regard to intensity measures, the results revealed the systematic changes in the patterns of overall RMS intensity near prosodic phrase boundary but the prominence effects are restricted to the nucleus. In terms of duration measures, both prosodic prominence and phrase boundary are the most closely related to the lengthening of the nucleus. Yet, prosodic prominence is more closely related to the lengthening of the onset while phrase boundary lengthens the coda duration more. The findings from the current study suggest that the phonetic realizations of prosodic prominence are different from those of prosodic phrase boundary, and speakers signal different prosodic structures through deliberate modulations of the internal phonetic structure of words and listeners attend to such phonetic variations.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.29-41
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• 2008

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Chinese speakers realize Korean prosodic phrases in the reading of Korean texts. Prosodic phrase, in this study, is defined as basic unit of spoken language which can be perceived as purely separate phonetic unit by both hearer and speaker, and is realized with a coherent intonational configuration. Prosodic phrase plays an important role in both speech production and perception. In the second language acquisition, prosody influences the accuracy and fluency of spoken language. The main purpose of this study is to describe the aspect of syntagmatic operation of prosody that produces prosodic phrases. We have specifically examined the relations between the prosodic phrase's boundary and its syntactic status. Furthermore, we examined internal syntactic structure of each prosodic phrase. And the results of each analysis were compared to the aspects of prosodic phrases' formation produced by native Korean speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers tend to coincide the prosodic phrases with syntactic structure more than native Korean speakers.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.113-133
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• 1998

The system proposed in this paper prosodically transcribes the intonation patterns, prosodic structures, phrasings, and other prosodic aspects of Korean utterances, on four parallel tiers: a tone tier, an orthographic tier, a break index tier, and a miscellaneous tier. The tone tier employs two phrase accents (L* and H *), three accentual phrase boundary tones (L-, H-, LH-), and four intonational phrase boundary tones (L%,H%,LH%,LHL%) in order to provide a phonological transcription of pitch events associated with accented syllables and phrase boundaries. The break index tier uses five break indices, numbered from 0 to 4, which mark a prosodic grouping of words and its prosodic structure in an utterance. Among the five indices, the break index 3 and the break index 4 align with an accentual phrase boundary tone and an intonational phrase boundary tone, respectively, in the tone tier.

• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.13-24
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• 1998

This study aims at examining the relationship between tonal events and their related vowel and syllable duration in Korean. Two things were investigated: one is to see if there is a hierarchical relationship in prosodic unit-final-lengthening and the other is to see if accentual phrase initial high tone syllable gets lengthened. Generally, higher prosodic units show larger degree of lengthening of the final vowel and also final syllable duration than the lower ones except for accentual phrase: Mean duration of utterance-final or intonational-phrase-final syllable(and its vowels) was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable(and its vowels). However, mean duration of accentual phrase final syllable was shorter than that of word final syllable. Mean vowel duration of accentual phrase initial high tone syllable was shorter than that of any other prosodic unit. Its mean syllable duration, however, was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable, indicating that strong consonants(fortis and aspirated) frequently appear in the accentual phrase initial position and this position is a prosodically strong position showing longer duration as well as high tone.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.89-105
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• 2005

This paper is a production study of the effects of Korean prosody on two voiceless coronal fricatives /$s^h$/ and /s*/. The target segments were embedded in four prosodic positions: initial to the Intonational Phrase or the Accentual Phrase, and medial to the Accentual Phrase or to the Prosodic Word. Acoustic measurements showed that the durational differences associated with the /$s^h$/ versus /s*/ contrast vary in magnitude in different prosodic positions, confirming the proposal that segmental properties are affected by prosodic categories. This suggests that any speech synthesizer should take into consideration prosodically conditioned durational variation.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.165-170
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• 2004

The aim of this paper is to study the relation between Eojeol and prosodic phrase in Korean. Depending on two adnominal ending form in Korean '-ㄴ' and '-ㄹ', there are some different prosodic phrase: 1) $1{\sim}2$ syllable eojeols : '-ㄴ' has none prosodic phrase in front of the eojeol, an accentual phrase in the end of the eojeol. In contrast, '-ㄹ' has an accentual phrase in front of the eojeol, but none in the end of the eojeol. 2) More than 3 syllable eojeols : '-ㄴ' have accentual phrases on the edge of the eojeol. but '-ㄹ' has an accentual phrase in the end of the eojeol.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.31-38
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• 2016

The purpose of the current study was to examine the acquisition of the second language prosody by Korean learners of English. Specifically, this study investigated Korean learners' patterns of prosodic phrasing and their use of edge tones (i.e., phrase accents and boundary tones) in English, and then compared the patterns with those of native English speakers. Eight Korean learners and 8 native speakers of English read 5 different English passages. Both groups' patterns of tones and prosodic phrasing were analyzed using the Mainstream American English Tones and Break Indices (MAE_ToBI) transcription conventions. The results indicated that the Korean learners chunked their speech into prosodic phrases more frequently than the native speakers did. This frequent prosodic phrasing pattern was especially noticeable in sentence-internal prosodic phrases, often where there was no punctuation mark. Tonal analyses revealed that the Korean learners put significantly more High phrase accents (H-) on their sentence-internal intermediate phrase boundaries than the native speakers of English. In addition, compared with the native speakers, the Korean learners used significantly more High boundary tones (both H-H% and L-H%) for the sentence-internal intonational phrases, while they used similar proportion of High boundary tones for the sentence-final intonational phrases. Overall, the results suggested that Korean learners of English successfully acquired the meanings and functions of prosodic phrasing and edge tones in English as well as that they are able to efficiently use these prosodic features to convey their own discourse intention.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.123-148
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• 2000

This paper investigates prosodic conditions for the epenthetic /n/ in Korean. It has been claimed that an epenthetic /n/ appears across prosodic words (Han 1994, Lee 1996). However, using acoustic data as well as aerodynamic data, I argue that the epenthetic /n/ does not always surface across all prosodic words, but that its appearance is prosodically restricted. I further demonstrate that it appears only across prosodic words within an accentual phrase. This finding provides empirical support for the intonation-based model of Korean prosodic structure studies.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.117-126
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• 2005

This study investigates the prosodic characteristics of Korean through the analysis of a large database. One female and one male speakers each read 650 sentences and they were segmentally and prosodically labeled. Statistical analyses were done on these utterances regarding the tonal pattern and the size of prosodic units, correlation between the size of higher level prosodic units and the number of lower level prosodic units. and the slope and F0 of the falling and rising contours of an accentual phrase. The results showed that the duration and the number of words and syllables of a prosodic unit were significantly different not only between speakers but also between its positions within a higher level prosodic nit. The munber of a prosodic unit showed a high correlation with the duration and the number of syllables of its higher level units. The slope of the falling contour within an accentual phrase was inversely Proportional to the number of its syllables. The slope was different depending on the first tone type of an accentual phrase, which could be explained with the F0 rising and the different amount of rising between tones when an accentual phrase starts with an H tone. The slope of the falling contour across an accentual phrase boundary showed a constant and larger value compared to one within an accentual phrase. The rising contours in the beginning and end of an accentual Phrase were similar in their slopes but they differ in the amount of F0 change : the former showed a larger amount of change. The slope of the rising contour which forms an accentual Phrase on its own was inversely Proportional to the number of its syllables.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.37 no.11
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• pp.837-844
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• 2010

Prediction of the prosodic phrase boundary is one of the most important natural language processing tasks. We propose, for the natural prediction of the Korean prosodic phrase boundary, a statistical approach incorporating efficient learning features. These new features reflect the factors that affect generation of the prosodic phrase boundary better than existing learning features. Notably, moreover, such learning features, extracted according to the hand-crafted prosodic phrase boundary prediction rule, impart higher accuracy. We developed a statistical model for Korean prosodic phrase boundaries based on the proposed new features. The results were 86.63% accuracy for three levels (major break, minor break, no break) and 81.14% accuracy for six levels (major break with falling tone/rising tone, minor break with falling tone/rising tone/middle tone, no break).